One of the activity of software testing engineer at Google is to build and improve the test infrastructure to help software developers to be more productive. In this blog post, Jochen Wuttke gives a concrete example of this task.
In one of his project at Google, Jochen Wuttke was responsible to understand the software testing issues associated to the maintenance of a legacy system. He discovered two main causes:
* Tight coupling and insufficient abstraction made unit testing very hard
* The infrastructure used for the end-to-end tests prevented to create and inject fakes or mocks for these services.
The blog post describes three solutions that he explore to solve these issues. He gives more details about the solution that was retained, how he implemented it and what results were achieved. His conclusion is that “Building and improving test infrastructure to help engineers be more productive is one of the many things test engineers do at Google. Running this project from requirements gathering all the way to a finished product gave me the opportunity to design and implement several prototypes, drive the full implementation of one solution, lead engineering teams to adoption of the new framework, and integrate feedback from engineers and actual measurements into the continuous refinement of the tool.”
Read the complete blog post on https://testing.googleblog.com/2016/11/what-test-engineers-do-at-google.html